Increasing Packet Sizes to Mitigate Performance Issues in High-Speed Packet Networks

Emerging packet-switched transport networks face a continuous growth of link bitrates. Without counter-measures, this translates into a proportional increase of the packet rate and may turn packet processing in network nodes into a bottleneck. In this paper, we investigate one approach to reduce the processing load for a given line rate: increasing the maximum size of packets exchanged between end systems. We first present the fundamental mechanisms along with side effects of increased packet sizes. Then we discuss the dependence of the achievable packet rate reduction on application and protocol stack. Based on a traffic model from the year 2000 and current measurements, we finally evaluate the reduction for web traffic and the Internet protocol stack. Results show that today's web traffic enables higher packet rate reductions than traffic of 2000. A fourfold packet size increase now allows to cut the packet rate by two thirds.